Lady in Waiting

Summary: She left her home when she was seventeen and she never returned. OneShot- Uzumaki Mito.

Warning: 15-minutes challenge. New character in my list.

Set: A long, long time ago in a faraway… Nope, just a long time ago.

Disclaimer: Standards apply.

The mirror shows:

A tall, lithe woman with flaming red hair and a thin face. Her cheekbones are prominent, something she doesn't really like but what people tell her makes her beautiful. Her heavy hair is braided elaborately, wines of red and gold held up by pins and needles (daggers, actually, sharp enough to kill) and by an endless number of seal tags. Except for the ornamental pins in her hair, she carries no jewelry.

She wears her usual white ceremonial robe, heavy and stiff and vanilla-scented, complete with three layers of under-cloth, the belt that makes it difficult to breathe sometimes and the traditional wooden sandals. She has learned to walk in her attire, has even learned to fight in it. It is like a second skin to her. Her dress is – perhaps surprisingly – bare of any patterns or colors. The seams of her garments are laced with seals, though. She has spent months on embroidering them into the material, has cut her hands on the sharp thread needed to make the seals permanent and has refused to stop or let anyone help her. Like her mother, and her mother's mother, she has worked all her skill into her robe. It is a part of her, her everyday dress and will, if fate means well, once be her burial robe as well. Her fan is ivory and wood and heavy, the sweet scent of cedar and cherry light and reminiscent. It was the last present her father gave her, the last and best-loved next to the pair of brushes he handed to her when she turned six, the age at which Sealers start with their training.

It seems like yesterday, she thinks. Only yesterday, the day she first saw what seals could do, the day she mastered the last seal and became a Master, the day she left her home, young and full of high-flying dreams. The Shodai Hokage needs an Uzumaki Sealing Master, was the message that reached her home, that day not so far away and yet so distant. I am the best of my generation, she had told her father, had fought and pled and blackmailed until he let her go. Let me go. Let me go. I want to do this. This is my fate. Fate - a laughable concept, laughable and ridiculous and so, so painful. Only daughter, only heir, and Mito Uzumaki really is the best sealer her generation has to offer. Her work resembles art, fine lines and arcs so beautiful people feel like crying just looking at it, and only the fact that her profession is a deadly one distinguishes her from the few civilians who work as calligraphy masters in Whirlpool.

If Hidden Leaf, founded a few years ago, already and always has been famous for its fighting skills and iron will, Whirlpool is famous for its seals.

There are legends that the founder of Uzushiogakure sealed a piece of heaven, hope and strength into a stone and used it to build the village Mito grew up in and maybe it is true, who knows? Today Whirlpool's Sealing Masters seal goods into barrels, seal animals into scrolls, seal wind into knots. The standing joke is that the best of them can seal happiness into a marriage, but that, at least, is a joke and always will remain one.

She grows up with them. The jokes, the seals, the sky. She can hold a brush before she can walk. Only daughter of the Clan leader, she lost her mother early and her father devotes all his love to her. Not that she grows up alone, as an only child – that she is not. The Uzumaki Clan is vast, lively, and her father has two sisters and a brother whose children grow up with Mito. But from all of them it is her who is the best Sealer, who can create runes as simply as others use words or breathe. It is Mito who masters a sealing technique that has been long lost to Uzushiogakure before she rediscovers and renews it. It is Mito who is one of the youngest Sealers to ever reach the grade of a Master, even in a village that has devoted itself to this art, and Mito, too, is the one to leave the village to serve under a warlord as the youngest Sealer in decades.

Shodaime, they called him, Senju Hashirama. The Fire Shadow, the one who has brought something resembling to peace to the war-torn country of Fire. Mito knows they don't expect her. Seventeen years and a woman, she is too young and too weak and, most importantly, not a man. Still, she refuses to obey when the Clan Elders tell her to know her place. But she holds her head high and refuses to be subdued. If there is anything Mito knows, it is this: she has to go. It has to be her. She will answer the Hokage's call and journey to the new village named Hidden Leaf. She will defend the name and the honor of her clan. She has been waiting her entire life. Now, finally, she has waited long enough.

The mirror reflects a flawless face.

Blue and green eyes, red hair, and her skin is smooth and soft. Applying her make-up takes her hours every morning. She works seals into it, sometimes more, sometimes less. She has been taught to do so and she still does it, no matter how far away she is from her home. A rune for strength on her lips. A rune for far-sight set on her lids. A rune that prevents her from talking in case she is captured and tortured – it goes on her tongue, black ink dark against her flesh until it sinks into her skin. The uppermost layers of lipstick are runes to let her know when people lie to her, to see hidden things and to react calm and careful no matter the situation. Black runes twine up her arms – seals for balance and strength – and run down her torso, some of them permanent, some of them having to be re-applied every day. She draws them with the same care she has been taught, with the knowledge that one line too much or too little or even twisted a tiny bit into the wrong direction carries consequences no human being alive possibly can imagine.

She is a piece of art, in many different ways.

Mito can feel the runes press against her skin. It feels like she is made of them, of seals and energy and black ink that run over her skin like scars. They tell a story. The seal tags in her hair make her head heavy and her neck stiff. Her long robe weights her down, refuses to let her move freely and restricts her breathing. The fan weights heavily in her hands, all the expectations and dreams and wishes the people of Whirlpool have placed on her when she left for Hidden Leaf whispering from it. Reminding her, always reminding. There are days when she does not want to wake up and prepare herself, days when she asks herself how she even is able to stand. And yet she gets up again every morning, applies the make-up and dresses in her ceremonial robes and renews her seals.

And the mirror shows her face, pale and collected, prominent cheekbones and thin, red brows, and she is tall and lithe and not a year younger than she was when she first came to Konoha with the naïve wish to be of help to the First Fire Shadow. To make a difference. To change a fate.

Mito sighs softly and puts down her fan in front of her. She still is beautiful, even now, sixty years later. She refuses to let the kyuubi take the last thing she has left: her vanity.

Just a little bit longer.